Archive Highlight; "The DJ Khaled Exception"

oh lord — I swear this one was meant to be just a funny quick post, and a slightly longer-form version of a joke I often tell at Immersive Creator tables, but it turns out I have a lot of feelings on this topic. I suspect I'll return to this essay to clean it up or find another angle sometime in the future, but for now, please enjoy one of the longest intros to a meme you've ever seen.

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This past Summer, I had a small reunion of sorts with a few friends in the interactive design space[1] at a “work-in-development” playtest . We were discussing some options for priming audiences for the piece we had just seen, and as we debated the merits of varying degrees of disclosure, someone made a declaration that went something like this: “I’m just not interested in the aesthetic of tricking people.”

I love this statement.

I often say I have two creative challenges I like to hold myself to in every piece:

1: I never offer a participant a choice I don’t welcome them to take 

2: I never tell a participant something that isn’t True.

Now, the delightfully pedantic readers among you may begin to feel themselves salivating at the opportunity to discuss “at what point ‘true’ stops,” but for the purposes of this challenge, I try not to be so clever or tricksy about it—indeed, I love that statement above because my rule here really boils down to not saying things or presenting information in a way that make participants feel ‘tricked’. Being ‘tricked’ is a special subset of being surprised; it’s more than just a broken expectation. It’s someone promising you something would be one way, and then finding out it’s another. In particular, it’s lies told to and/or about you, and your participation in the world of the piece.

While there is certainly a moral element to this (insofar as “don’t be a dick” is a really excellent moral center), I want to actually shift the conversation out of moral judgment and into design choices. After all, what totally caught me about the statement that summer night was the particular phrase “the aesthetic of tricking people.” Ultimately, as a creator, I think any conversation about “Accountability” in theater (or really anything at all in theater) has to be grounded in outcomes. Like any design choice, tricking your audience can function towards various desired effects. A few effects of a “trick” come to mind that I think are worth examining: to generate surprise, excitement or shock; to establish character, worldbuilding, or make a statement of artist perspective; to control an audience; to impress with a demonstration of skill—or of course, “it’s just a prank, bro, loosen up.”

Seeing as I have never been and will never be loose, I’d like instead to make an exhaustive case here that it’s really hard for the aesthetics of tricking your audience to have positive outcomes in any of those intentions that could outweigh the corresponding costs.

Let’s start with the most basic; “what a twist!” you might hope the audience will say a way of generating surprise, excitement or shock. Maybe. First off, it’s worth remembering that if you’re going to have a stunning reveal that what we were told was a lie, you first have to make sure we understood it clearly. I’ve been to (and in) a lot of shows where the creators assume some piece of news will blow the minds of their audience, only to find that the audience is still trying to grasp the basic premise of the piece, and so the crows is left just scratching their heads rather than losing them. But let’s presume you really sold this piece of information you’re going to negate; for instance, some works can achieve this by having well-written exposition and clear, engaging onboarding, and then introducing one unreliable character. I find participants tend to exist on the bell curve for ‘suspicious minds,’ so while you’ll always have some folks who never saw it coming, there will also always be a fair amount of participants for whom your sudden and inevitable betrayal fulfills all their deeply held skepticism. To crack even these most stubborn paranoiacs, you have to really build a relationship between player and character—and the more you do that, the higher the eventual cost of broken trust. If you actually managed to create real investment in a participant, you’ve just punished them for that behavior, and encouraged them not to repeat it. And if you didn’t manage to create real investment, your moment will fall flat in the first place.

“Ah, but that pain is all part of the narrative!” you might cry out defensively. “That character is evil!” Okay. Was tricking your participant the most interesting available tool to tell that story? Don’t forget, as a participant, I’m a character too. What does this interaction say about my character? Is there going to be time to repair or resolve this relationship? Will I ever recover my lost status?  In most experiences, every truth I know I learned in the last 20-90 minutes. You don’t get a lot of time or attention for underscoring what’s important. If you’re going to be breaking one of the pillars of my understanding of “what’s going on here,” it had better count for something dramaturgically—it might even need to be the whole point of the piece. And when that happens, how much will I associate being duped with this one character, and how much will I attribute it to the whole show, or the show’s creators? How much will I feel I was just brought here to be tricked?

“That’s just it! This is worldbuilding!” you counter; “no one here can be trusted!” Okay. What’s the behavior you want from your participants? How do you want them to play? And how will you continue to introduce new instructions or information after you’ve conditioned them to assume any faith they vest in something they are told may be punished later. I once heard Jessica Creane say “games are practice for how we want to live our lives.” What is it you want to practice with us? Is the larger story you’re trying to tell that we can’t trust people? Personally, I have enough practice with that story as is. I come to art to imagine more interesting possibilities.

Sometimes the temptation to lie to your audience is much more practical than emotional or narrative. Often when a creator is telling me about a moment of misleading participants, it’s because they want or need a certain behavior from their players for the planned interaction to work. For me, I’m very wary about any desire to get a participant to do something they wouldn’t knowingly agree to do, both for the obvious ethical implications and for the more specific concern of wanting to shape effective experiences. In interactive works (or at least the ones I find most exciting), the most meaningful narrative content is created by or made of the participant’s choices. When designed correctly, those moments of decision are the ones a player most closely identifies with, and projects the most meaning onto; when I truly suspend disbelief and make a choice from my gut, that choice is who I am. But when we trick a player to get them there, it can easily cheapen that sense of choice, and even if you manage to maintain some sense of the players agency, they can easily put distance between themselves and any uncomfortable truths they may have encountered; “well, I wouldn’t have really done that if you hadn’t tricked me.”

So tricking folks is hard to make exciting, and an expensive tool for telling what is ultimately often not an interesting story, with the side effect of making a participant more distant from any of the meaning that was created. Can it be entertaining? My friend the magician and storyteller Jon Tai told me once that most magic shows make sure to start with one really impressive illusion, so folks know they are in good hands. And it’s true, like any effect, tricking an audience can be done with skill, and with the right amount of coordination, planning and charisma, it can even feel like a feat. But being lied to isn’t a particularly novel interaction for anyone on this planet — if lying was a grand achievement, 80% of the men on dating apps could add “artist” to their profile. So if it’s going to impress us, you have to really pull something off — which means sinking a ton of energy and resources into crafting the meta-narrative that I, as your participant, am foolish, dumb, or gullible. And frankly, I walked into your experience knowing that, so your energy is probably better spent elsewhere.

Could it be funny? Probably, but lots of things are funny. Puns are funny. Throwing a pie is funny. Slapstick and well placed sound cues are funny. You have plenty of options for making us laugh; which ones actually inform the larger story you want to tell? And can you find one that doesn’t reduce my compliance, train me to view you with suspicion and push me to invest less in your story?

Put another way; if it’s supposed to be funny, who’s laughing? And who are they laughing at?

Every time I think about this topic of tricking an audience, I am brought back to one of my core memories of being an audience member. I’m young— maybe 5 or 6— and I’m seeing a show at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga California. As I remember it, it was a sunny, clear day—which in California narrows the month down to somewhere between January and December—and the stands were packed, but I had a seat right in the front row to see the magician, who was also a clown (naturally). The man on stage was doing a simple version of the famous “cut the rope” illusion, and he needed an assistant. I was desperate to be picked, throwing my arm in the air and jumping up and down in front of my bench. Knowing a mark when he saw one, the magician invited me up, handed me the scissors, and asked me to cut the rope. I peered out at the expectant crowd, screwed up my face in concentration, carefully took the scissors and squeezed—only for nothing to happen. The scissors wouldn’t budge. “What’s the matter?” asked the magician in an exaggerated fashion, taking the scissors back and easily clicking them a few times; “just cut the rope.” He handed them back, and I squeezed with all my might, but they were once again locked in place. We repeated this a few times: I turned red with effort squeezing, he took back the trick scissors a few times to breezily snap them together and deliver laugh lines. To be honest, I don’t even remember if I got to cut the rope or not. All I remember is how I felt: the butt of the joke.

My sister is an exotic animal trainer (yes, really; you’re currently reading the Patreon of the least interesting Trapman-O’Brien child), and she always talks to me about affirming behavior when training animals— particularly when you are trying to get them to do something complicated, challenging, or unusual. Agreeing to participate, stepping on stage, being willing to put myself out there in front of a crowd: however small the stakes were, it felt like a big deal to me. It took the majority of my six year old courage to do it, and in the end I felt dumb for trying hard, and embarrassed that an audience of strangers saw me cry.

Which, for all my tortured analysis above, is really what I’m talking about when I say “never tell a participant something that isn’t true.” Don’t make me feel punished for trusting you. Vulnerability and curiosity are powerful and important behaviors, and I want to attend and create experiences that reward me for practicing them, rather than teaching me to avoid them.

AND

with all that said, I do believe there’s an exemption to everything I just wrote above: a loophole that lets you enjoy every desired effect above with hardly any of the negative side effects.

How could such a thing be done? When is a trick not a trick?

In the words of a wise sage:

Yes, we’re taking a cue from the DJ, producer, and arguably worst ever Hot Ones guest DJ Khaled, who in 2015 added “you played yourself” to his limited set of catchphrases and thus birthed a popular meme turned a brief but intense cultural phenomena (don’t believe me? Ask Jia Tolentino, and she’d refer you to her New Yorker article). To this day, you can still see people popping this GIF in the comments under people who have revealed, ensnared, embarrassed or otherwise made a fool of themselves.

So what does any of this have to do with interactive experience design?

Well, all of the drawbacks I mentioned above stem from the fact that the trick in question was something that was done to a participant. But if you can get a participant to fool themselves, you can accomplish any of the desired effects we talked about before without aggravating the power relationship between you and the participant. In fact, when done correctly, I’ve found this can oddly even heighten the player’s sense of agency; they can come to experience this feeling of being fooled as a real outcome of their own action.

Pulling this off requires a good deal of elegance and skill, but it’s distinctly achievable, and using the principle of not lying to the participant can help be the guide: you need someone to assume something is true without ever telling them so. To do that blamelessly, I find I end up really digging deep into what is true instead. What are the true statements “A” and “B” I can present to a participant that will have them automatically presume “C” is also true? This works best when you lean on existing real world expectations and heuristics that we all tend to carry around, and by doing so, the resulting surprise hits deeper; I’m not questioning a statement I was offered 20 minutes ago, I’m questioning a habit I’ve carried for 20 years. Rather than getting us to listen less, this kind of trick can invite us to listen closer, to notice more and question our existing assumptions. Getting an audience to trick themselves can help walk the fine line of controlling the release of information while maintaining a sense of trust: “you can believe what I say, but you can’t guess what will happen next.” And as the profound unseriousness of DJ Khaled reminds us - figuring out that we tricked ourselves can be pretty funny.

There are still threats to status here, but if we can affirm the participant throughout - position ourselves as being just as surprised as they were, or as laughing with them and not at them, we can even make the trick feel like something that performer and participant accomplished together.

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[1] because I greatly admire them, here’s a shoutout: the group included the exceptional Jessica Creane (my collaborator on Fair Trade turned dear friend by the process) as well as Joseph Ahmed and Arianna Gass (phenomenal creators and makers in their individual rights and both part of Obvious Agency, a very cool cooperatively owned Philadelphia performance company). If this essay managed to hold your attention, then these are definitely all folks worth keeping an eye out for!